Manchin panned downgrading the sentences of Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks to life in prison for the 2002 murder of 19-year-old Marshall University student Samantha Burns as “horribly misguided and insulting.”

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“After speaking to Samantha Burns’ parents, I believe it is my duty to speak on their behalf and say President Biden’s decision to commute the death sentences for the two men convicted in her brutal murder is horribly misguided and insulting,” Manchin said in social media posts on Thursday.

Basham and Fulks were among the 37 out of 40 death row inmates whose death penalty sentences Biden commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Other inmates whose lives Biden spared were convicted of killing police, military officers, prisoners, and prison guards, as well as deadly bank robberies and drug deals.

Burns was killed in Ohio following a carjacking at a West Virginia mall by Basham and Fulks as part of a deadly weekslong crime spree through multiple states after escaping from a jail in Hopkins County, Kentucky. The pair was not on death row for the killing of Burns. Rather, they were sentenced to death for the kidnapping and killing of 44-year-old Alice Donovan in South Carolina during the same crime spree.

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Manchin said the Burns family wrote to Biden and the Department of Justice “pleading for them not to do this, but their concerns were unheard.”

“I can’t imagine the grief that Kandi and John Burns are reliving and dealing with during the holiday season,” Manchin said. “As their U.S. Senator and a father, I want to express my deepest sympathy for their continued suffering. Please know that Samantha will forever be in our prayers.”

The criticism from Manchin, who blasted his former Democratic Party as “toxic” just days prior in one of his last interviews before leaving Congress, is part of the continued fallout from Biden’s controversial clemency in his final weeks in office. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, which called Biden’s clemency “abhorrent,” circulated Manchin’s remarks Friday morning.

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Biden’s decision, announced earlier this week, was made by the outgoing president because the White House said he “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder — which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”

The three death row inmates whose sentences Biden did not commute were Dylann Roof, convicted of the 2015 killings of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue shooter who killed 11 congregants in 2018.

The White House said Biden’s directive also served to prevent Trump, an advocate of expanding capital punishment, “from carrying out the execution sentences.” Trump responded by vowing to direct the DOJ to “vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.”

Biden commuted nearly 1,500 sentences, the most ever in a single day, earlier this month for those who served their sentences in home confinement during COVID-19.

“The president’s criminal justice record has transformed individual lives and positively impacted communities, especially historically marginalized communities,” the White House said. “In the coming weeks, the president will take additional steps to provide meaningful second chances and continue to review additional pardons and commutations.”